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Tuesday, April 10, 2012

First, I'm HERE, guest-blogging over at Louisa Bacio's blog today, talking about five things I think (I hope) makes Royal Street a little different in the crowded urban fantasy genre.

Because.. After forever, Royal Street is finally out! I'll be posting launch-signing event pics tomorrow (the event is tonight), but on Monday, I spent the day driving Plaquemines Parish, just southeast of New Orleans, looking for merpeople. Well, okay, I was doing some fact-checking for book two, River Road, which I'm finishing up final proofs on next week. Plaquemines photos to come.

Here are a few others from my travels yesterday as I scouted for places to take people on my Authors After Dark tour this summer:

This is shot through the gate at the New Orleans Katrina Memorial. Through the fleur-de-lis in the gate, you can see the raised tombs of the Charity Potters Field cemetery and the unmarked graves of those who died too poor to pay for a tomb. It's kind of chilling. More on the memorial itself, below.

The site of the Seventeenth Street Canal floodwall collapse in the Lakeview area of New Orleans, which is the breach referenced most in Royal Street and is the major one that let Lake Pontchartrain drain into New Orleans. My first house in NOLA was about four blocks from the breach site. One of the things people don't understand about the levee failures is that while Katrina pushed the water into the canals and put pressure on them, they collapsed because of shoddy engineering. The sign says: "On August 29, 3005, a federal floodwall atop a levee on the 17th Street Canal, the largest and most important drainage canal for the city, gave way here, causing flooding that killed hundreds. This breach was one of 50 ruptures in the Federal Flood Protection System that occurred that day. In 2008, the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Louisiana, placed responsibility for the floodwalls' collapse squarely on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. However, the agency is protected from financial liability in the Flood Control Act of 1928." In other words, yeah, we screwed you but you can't do anything about it. Which is why New Orleanians were so very, very angry. Nuff said.

The gate leading into the Katrina Memorial, at Potters Field cemetery. There are a number of big marble unmarked tombs circling a walk in the shape of a hurricane. The bodies of the hundreds of victims of Katrina whose bodies were never identified are buried here.

Okay, after all the despressing stuff, there was crawfish!

To those of you who read this blog regularly, thank you for all the support over the last couple of years as Royal Street has crept toward publication!

Congratulations on the release! As a former Louisiana resident, I am so happy you've brought attention to the state through your book. I love the pics. We had a crawfish boil a few days ago. Love that stuff!

When the Levees Broke, an HBO special opened my eyes to the massive failures by the US Corps of Engineers.